I'm a bit frustrated at the moment. Captivate doesn't
seem to like the program that I'm trying to create demonstrations
for. When I do a drag and drop, it automatically does a captured
animation (full motion capture). But when I watch it back, the
entire rest of the screen disappears except for the mouse and the
menu items it appears over. I have tried adding the program as a
background, but it doesn't show up behind the animation. Basically,
the whole screen goes white and then you see the mouse move and a
few menu items appear. Then, when that's done, the rest of the
program comes back. I'm finding this very frustrating, because I
think Captivate is a really good product.

Welcome to the Captivate User Community,
KimuraCarter. It sounds like something is interrupting the
proper execution of your full-motion feature. If you can do it
without ruining everything, turn off the "automatic" full motion
capture by going to ...
Edit > Preferences > Recording > Full Motion... and de-select all full motion options. You can still use
full motion, as it remains available manually ... the default is to
press F9 to begin, and F10 to end full motion capture during
recording.

I figured it out. If you've ever had this happen, what you
need to do is downsize your recording area. Captivate simply
couldn't handle the complicated drag and drop motion capture while
trying to capture the whole screen. This then involves "grafting"
the animation back onto the slide you wanted it on originally. But
at least it works. Fiddling with the transparency helps, too.

I also have a very high resolution screen, and I wonder if
that contributed.

quote:
Originally posted by:
KimuraCarterI figured it out. If you've ever had this happen, what you
need to do is downsize your recording area. Captivate simply
couldn't handle the complicated drag and drop motion capture while
trying to capture the whole screen. This then involves "grafting"
the animation back onto the slide you wanted it on originally. But
at least it works. Fiddling with the transparency helps, too.

I also have a very high resolution screen, and I wonder if
that contributed.

It does yes. A good rule of thumb is to do your work at
1024x768 max resolution, and use the snap to fit in custom
recording size to accomplish it. Trial and error have shown me that
anything over this is difficult to distribute due to size and, in
the case of full motion video, it clips badly on complicated screen
motion.

One thing you can do to improve performance, however, if you
have a 3rd part video card (NVIDIA or ATI perferably), you can load
either their forceware or catalyst (or just standard drivers in the
case of matrox, quantum, or 3dlabs), and the card has presets for
things like single and dual monitor performance, and other
application overrides that can relieve some serious strain on your
CPU.

Note: this is only likely to help windows users, as OS X
still doesn't allow for third party driver integration : \